Monday, August 31, 2015

"Elections are run by the public relations industry. Its primary task is commercial advertising, which is designed to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices - the exact opposite of how markets are supposed to work, but certainly familiar to anyone who has watched television.

"It's only natural that when enlisted to run elections, the industry would adopt the same procedures in the interests of the paymasters, who certainly don't want to see informed citizens making rational choices."

Monday, August 24, 2015

The return to economic fundamentalism and libertarian anti-socialism
has meant great progress for many and enormous regression for most. That is textbook
free market unregulated capitalism, though a post war move to government
investment in some aspects of life not producing private profit gave a social
democratic appearance of change for a minority when there really was
substantially none for the majority. But the neo-liberal attack on anything
remotely smacking of humanity, common sense or market control has brought this globally
dominant system producing humanity’s goods and services to a point of crisis
never before experienced. Even a social democratic revival may not be enough to
avoid cataclysmic situations that have resulted from the unleashing of private
greed as prime motivator for anything and everything that happens in life, or reaches
the market, which under the domain of capital is the same thing.

The sharpened divisions among people accepting the lie of an
individually competitive system for themselves while their rulers enjoy the
most caring, sharing, near communist social welfare services imaginable, has
led to situations that bring the contradictions of capital’s privately
controlled markets into what should be a clearer perspective. The national
immigration surge of the past twenty or so years has been joined by one of
increasing gentrification, with both bringing profits to some, losses to most,
and dangerous divisions to society that threaten to tear the social fabric to shreds
before anyone notices that even with all the past patching there wasn’t much
there to begin with.

The economic programs that bring austerity, downscaling and
immigration are the same ones that bring luxury, upscaling and gentrification. Gentrimigrant
Immification?

Millions of bodies entering the country as cheap labor are extremely
profitable for capital and some of its professional servant class but represent
loss to those no longer holding the jobs they take and bearing the social
expense of working the newcomers into society. Likewise, the high earning
people who move into neighborhoods and communities being gentrified are
immigrants with a profound affect on these communities, bringing business,
wealth, higher real estate values and profits to many while the original
dwellers and inhabitants are either pushed out of housing when prices become
too high or remain but are forced into second class status and no longer able
to afford to shop in their own communities.

Foreign immigration on the one hand, leading to greater
profits that also create loss, and internal immigration on the other, leading
to greater profits that also create loss. That the economics are the same is
slowly dawning on more people, but the divisions and ugliness among groups
forced into competition while others enjoy cooperative profit making could
cause far more pain and bitterness before it is seen for what it is: capitalist
free market private profit seeking which always brings happiness to some,
unhappiness to others and misery to more than should be tolerable any longer.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

In a political field of republican assholes who represent
billionaires and love Israel, Donald Trump stands out because he is an asshole
who is a billionaire and loves Israel. He is also outspoken in ways unfamiliar
to his more conventional opponents who must always be suck-ups to wealth and
power while he is the wealth and power they suck-up to, under normal
circumstances. But the reaction to him by what passes for established intelligentsia
tells us more about where we are as a nation than the near imbecile candidates
themselves. Treating this campaign as something different because the field is
overrun with assholes, only one of them seeming unique, means that the critics have
somehow missed all campaigns and debates for the entire television age.

What passes for standard political gibberish has enthralled America’s
mind managers and consciousness controllers to bring out the smallest vote of
any alleged democracy, with few noticing that there has never been a president
actually voted in by a majority of the electorate, but only by a majority –
sometimes – of those who show up to vote. The combination of those who do not
vote at all and those who do not vote for the winner is the real majority, all
the time, and that shameful performance is overlooked, not understood, or kept
from the public’s awareness in order to insure belief in the mythology of a
national democracy.

The Trump TV personality phenomenon is hardly anything new,
with people of even less intellectual and political grasp all over the spectrum
and in both wings of the ruling party running for and serving in high political
offices. But his great wealth and tv star status have made him a bigger
personality, if a lesser brainiac, than say a Ross Perot who was also very rich
but motivated by much less ego and much more sincerity. Interestingly, Perot
loomed large in getting Bill Clinton into the white house and the Trumpeter is
thought by many to be a plot to get Hillary in if/when he runs as an
independent. But whatever his ultimate aims beyond satisfying an elephantine
ego even greater than that of the other elephantine assholes, his impact is
already beyond the understanding of his critics from the lib-con bi-partisan
establishment.

They hate him for his outspoken behavior flaws that are
embarrassing to their positions as ruling class servants since he speaks openly
about the political power of money, what he can buy and sell, including some of
the assholes he is running against, and in so doing threatens to upset the
political economic clergy of America’s capital religion. Democracy? Sure, if
you can buy it, and that’s what he’s openly doing while at the same time
criticizing the process. Contradictions? We’ve got ‘em, big time.

In return for his outspoken confrontation of certain
systemic flaws which he thrives on but is willing to admit are social weaknesses,
the con-lib establishment anxiously picks at his individualistic problems
regarding often meaningless gossip items of the type that make him famous
rather than any meaningful policy position he may represent which hardly threatens
any aspect of the political economic system. Except, of course, to treat it is
a sham purchasable by the rich, which he acknowledges while others play dumb,
since they grovel before those rich in order to maintain their political jobs
and campaigns.

Trump doesn’t do the usual word mincing and focus group
editing of his remarks before stating his feelings, which he believes are
shared by “america” and in which belief he is closer to the truth than his
puppets-for-wealth-and-israel opponents. He acts as ego puppeteer in chief and
excites more people than are manipulated into being turned off by his rudeness,
overstatements and identity politics gaffs. But while servants of mind
management react in shock, he maintains high ratings in the polls. This, of
course, is because the political and media servants are brilliant and most
Americans are too stupid to understand the subtleties, nuances and levels of
bullshit those servants help reinforce.

At the same time that Trump pleases americans who are disgusted
with political life in general – tiny minorities express support for congress
and slightly larger ones for the president – his shoot-from-the-mouth style
also appeals to many of the propeller beanie caucus that offer fair game for
those passing as slightly more intelligent. That would be those who only wear
their beanies in private and never in public. Lost in the lowest common denominator
politics of major media and major politics is the great disgust of so many
americans with what passes for their alleged democracy and finally having
someone speak plainly and openly, even if often brainlessly sounding like so many
others. The situation is so dreadful that this is seen as a refreshing change.

At the same time on the other democratic side of usually
asshole campaigns another candidate who causes fits among established power is
running in the primary against her highness billary and doing so on a
left-populist platform reviving past social democratic policies to counter the unrestrained
capitalism which is destroying much more than our own economy in an orgy of
creating fabulous wealth for a minority and appalling problems for the
majority. Bernie Sanders even calls himself a socialist and while the hopeless
right tends to see any government or public activity as socialism, Sanders goes
further than any of the other toadies on his side of the spectrum regarding economic
policies. He is calling for higher wages for workers, higher taxes on wealth
and generally sounding like a free market fundamentalist’s worst nightmare. Unfortunately,
this does not yet hold true for his foreign policy stance that mostly echoes
the assholes on Israel with slightly less reliance on provoking nuclear war.
What does this say about the country at a time of much greater economic and
social stress, even if consciousness control keeps telling us things are
getting better every day? Perhaps the smug manipulators and the unfortunates
who think themselves the only ones who understand will see that the public is
only as ignorant as it is kept, and they are among that public as long as they
agree that what the people want they cannot have because the only realistic
outcome of any election is for the rich to get what they want.

Which viewpoint is stupid, anti-democratic and most likely
to vote for an asshole representing the rich?